Archive for the ‘Beatles’ tag

As noted last month, Ken Kesey’s Furthur could be considered one of the most influential buses for inspiring a million hippies to turn their Volkswagen Type 2s into rolling psychedelic painting canvases. For that matter, it very well may have set the whole art car movement into motion. Since writing about its pending restoration, though, we’ve been trying to think of some of the more direct influences it’s had, and we’ve come up with four.

We’ll start with the Muppets’ Electric Mayhem bus, if only because Animal. Based on an International Loadstar (IMCDB notes it was a 1963 Loadstar, probably a 1700, with a Carpenter school bus body), it debuted in The Muppet Movie in 1979, then made a couple more appearances (Muppets from Space, 1999; and The Muppets, 2011) before making a cameo in a recent Super Bowl ad (sporting an incredibly similar paint scheme, but this time based on an Advance Design Chevrolet chassis).

While not as elaborately painted as Furthur, we should include the Beatles’ Magical Mystery Tour bus for the simple fact that it’s the only other bus that Tom Wolfe mentions by name as being directly influenced by Furthur in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. Part of a made-for-TV movie-slash-music-video experiment, the Magical Mystery Tour was conceived by Paul McCartney in April 1967, but not implemented until that August. The folks at IMCDB have identified it as a Plaxton-bodied 1967 Bedford VAL 14 Panorama I, and it reportedly still exists.

Like any countercultural element subjected to pop culture appropriation, Furthur undoubtedly inspired the Partridge Family’s 1957 Chevrolet school bus-turned-tour-bus featuring a Piet Mondrian-influenced paint scheme, which debuted with the television show in September 1970. For more on the bus, check out Kurt’s brief history.

Finally, the Scooby Doo Mystery Machine, again more pop culture than counterculture, but perhaps there was a bit of subversiveness on the part of Hanna-Barbera’s staff in developing a kids’ show using a hippie bus (one with no back windows at that) as the main characters’ mode of transportation.

Can you think of any more instances like these? Let us know in the comments.

* Whatever happened to John Lennon’s Harold Radford-tweaked Mini? One would think that some rabid Beatles fan would have found it by now, but as Jeroen Booij at Maximum Mini related this week, there’s several theories as to the Mini’s fate, one of them even tied in to the theory that John still walks (drives) among us…

* Speaking of British rock stars’ cars, the Daily Mail recently put together a story with plenty of photos of Beatles and Rolling Stones members and their various rides. (via)

* Furniture made from old car parts is good. Furniture made from old car parts and that still maintains the usability of the parts on cars, if called upon, is better. Ronan Glon at Ran When Parked took the better route when making a desk from a Mercedes-Benz 220D trunklid.

Those aren’t scales on this 1968 Morris Mini for sale on Hemmings.com; they’re pennies. And this is apparently no run-of-the-mill art car, rather one of three done up this way to promote the Beatles’ song “Penny Lane.” How fun would it be to go through a tollbooth in this and plead that you don’t have correct change. From the seller’s description:

covered in pre 1968 (out of circulation) British pennies. The car was built to commemorate the Beatles hit Penny Lane which came out in 1968. It has over 4000 pennies epoxied to the skin of the car and is covered in lacquer to prevent oxidation from turning them green. Several pennies date back to the late 1800′s, and even a few valuable Queen Victoria pennies have been found on the car. Paul McCartney commissioned at least 2 Penny Lane Minis which appear to have been done exactly like this one. One is located in Cornwall, England at a place called Cornish Goldsmiths and the other at a Rock and Roll Museum in San Francisco. This Mini was originally owned and used by a company in England for promotional purposes. The company eventually went under and one of the former employers bought the car for himself. He and his family then owned the car for over 26 years. They took it to car shows regularly and offered prizes to the people who could come closest to guessing the correct amount of pennies on the car. The family estimated that the car, over the years, raised up to 750,000GBP for local charities in the Liverpool area. I purchased the car in 2002 and brought it here to the US.